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Morgridge Institute lands cybersecurity grant

Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and three other institutions have received a five-year, $23.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to bolster the nation's cybersecurity.

The group will operate the Software Assurance Marketplace, which will address threats to software used in a variety of applications, from the national power grid to medical devices, the Morgridge Institute said in a news release. Much of this software is developed in a so-called open source environment, where multiple programmers work together to contribute different parts.

"There is often limited access to security tools and resources in such open source environments," said Miron Livny, director of core computational technology at the Morgridge Institute, and a University of Wisconsin - Madison computer sciences professor.

The Morgridge Institute, the private side of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW-Madison campus, will receive $14.9 million of the grant money. UW-Madison will receive $4.7 million; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive $2.1 million; and Indiana University will receive $1.9 million.

Brooklin Gore, a senior researcher at the Morgridge Institute, will be chief operations officer for the effort, which Gore says will create 25 jobs among the collaborating partners.